It was a defeat long foretold, but that does not diminish the scale of the debacle David Cameron suffered in Ypres last night. His tone afterwards was self-righteous: his fellow leaders would “live to regret” their support for Jean-Claude Juncker as the President of the European Commission, which was “a sad moment for Europe”. But his abject failure to halt the Juncker juggernaut, which gained the support of 26 out of 28 leaders, was an even sadder moment for Mr Cameron himself, and for Britain.
The candidacy of Mr Juncker, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, aroused enthusiasm among very few, even in the upper ranks of the Eurocrats. He is a walking, talking symbol of all that is out of date and out of touch about the union as currently constituted, and he was not even favoured by Angela Merkel, who was unimpressed by his handling of the euro crisis. But in a spectacular display of political miscalculation, Mr Cameron converted that indifference and dislike into reluctant but almost total support, painting himself into a corner which in the end he shared only with Viktor Orban, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary.
As Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, pointed out earlier this week, Mr Cameron had made the mistake of “playing the man, not the ball” over Mr Juncker’s appointment, taking an aggressively personal tone against a figure who is immensely well knitted into conservative forces across the bloc. Read on and comment » | Editorial | Friday, June 27, 2014
